23-year-old Noel Shannon was in the Oregon mountains to take pictures of wildlife in the area. But on her drive back home to Washington, it was the wildlife that caused a tragic accident.

Noel swerved her Toyota truck in order to avoid hitting a deer on the road. Her vehicle flipped several times, eventually landing on her left leg that was sticking out of the window.

She was trapped.

Bleeding profusely, Noel was desperate to break free and seek help. She decided to try and use her keys to first try to dig under the car door to release her leg. But after 10 hours of work, she could only make small dent in the solid ground.

Her next plan was to amputate her own leg with her keys!

But before she began cutting, Noel realizes that her keys were too short and too dull to slice through her flesh. Her only hope would be to jerk her leg out as hard as she could pull.

With great pain, Noel managed to tug her limb out from under the truck. Her leg was now in even worse shape and still bleeding. She made a tourniquet out of her sweatshirt. She had lost so much blood already though that she was only able to move 15 feet from her truck before she collapsed from exhaustion.

Noel later described what was going through her mind at that moment, saying:

"I couldn't believe it was happening to me and I really thought I was going to die.”

Luckily, Noel did not die. At around 8:30am the next day, more than 12 hours after the accident, two Army combat veterans came upon the crash site and discovered Noel collapsed on the road!

She was saved!

Noel said of her heroes:

"I see this older Toyota 4-Runner coming up the road. It was like they were angels from heaven.”

Emergency room doctors were able to repair the artery in her left leg but still had to amputate due to the dead muscle tissue.

Surgeons removed her left leg and now Noel is on her way to recovering. She will spend the next six months in a wheelchair. But she has plans of getting a prosthetic leg so that she can go running again, one of her many hobbies.

Hang in there, gurl! You’re no doubt strong enough to get through this!